Caste Gender And Christianity In Colonial India

Beginning in the nineteenth century, native women preachers served and led nascent Protestant churches in much of Southern India, evolving their own mission theology and practices. This volume examines the impact of Telugu socio-political dynamics, such as caste, gender, and empire, on the theology and practices of the Telugu Biblewomen.

At the height of British colonialism, conversion to Christianity was a path to upward mobility for Indian low-castes and untouchables, especially in the Tamil-speaking south of India. Kent examines these conversions, focusing especially on the experience of women converts and the ways in which conversion transformed gender roles and expectations.

This Book Focuses On How The Notion Of Being `High Caste`, As It Developed And Transformed During The Colonial Period, Contributed, To The Formation Of A `Middle Class` Among The Hindus And The Sikhs.

“This is a powerful and exciting work. Mosse has produced a work of scholarship that is lively and readable without any loss of subtlety and sophistication. It is a ground-breaking study, of critical importance to the ways we understand religious nationalism and the anthropology of postcolonial experience.”—Susan Bayly, author of Asian Voices in a Postcolonial Age

By studying the history and sources of the Thomas Christians of India, a community of pre-colonial Christian heritage, this book revisits the assumption that Christianity is Western and colonial and that Christians in the non-West are products of colonial and post-colonial missionaries. Christians in the East have had a difficult time getting heard—let alone understood as anti-colonial. This is a problem, especially in studies on India, where the focus has typically been on North India and British colonialism and its impact in the era of globalization. This book analyzes texts and contexts to show how communities of Indian Christians predetermined Western expansionist goals and later defined the Western colonial and Indian national imaginary. Combining historical research and literary analysis, the author prompts a re-evaluation of how Indian Christians reacted to colonialism in India and its potential to influence ongoing events of religious intolerance. Through a rethinking of a postcolonial theoretical framework, this book argues that Thomas Christians attempted an anti-colonial turn in the face of ecclesiastical and civic occupation that was colonial at its core. A novel intervention, this book takes up South India and the impact of Portuguese colonialism in both the early modern and contemporary period. It will be of interest to academics in the fields of Renaissance/Early Modern Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Religious Studies, Christianity, and South Asia.

This book is a critical biography of Baba Padmanji (1831-1906), a firebrand native Christian missionary, ideologue, and litterateur from 19th-century Bombay Presidency. Though Padmanji was well-known, and a very influential figure among Christian converts, his contributions have received inadequate attention from the perspective of ‘social reform’ — an intellectual domain dominated by offshoots of the Brahmo Samaj movement, like the Prarthana Samaj in Bombay. This book constitutes an in-depth analysis of Padmanji’s relationships with questions of reform, education, modernity, feminism, and religion, that had wide-ranging repercussions on the intellectual horizon of 19th-century India. It presents Padmanji’s integrated writing persona and identity as a revolutionary pathfinder of his times who amalgamated and blended vernacular ideas of Christianity together with early feminism, modernity, and incipient nationalism. Drawing on a variety of primary and secondary sources, this unique book will be of great interest for area studies scholars (especially Maharashtra), and to researchers of modern India, engaged with the history of colonialism and missions, religion, global Christianity, South Asian intellectual history, and literature.

Caste and gender are complex markers of difference that have traditionally been addressed in isolation from each other, with a presumptive maleness present in most studies of Dalits (“untouchables”) and a presumptive upper-casteness in many feminist studies. In this study of the representations of Dalits in the print culture of colonial north India, Charu Gupta enters new territory by looking at images of Dalit women as both victims and vamps, the construction of Dalit masculinities, religious conversion as an alternative to entrapment in the Hindu caste system, and the plight of indentured labor. The Gender of Caste uses print as a critical tool to examine the depictions of Dalits by colonizers, nationalists, reformers, and Dalits themselves and shows how differentials of gender were critical in structuring patterns of domination and subordination.